Isla Negra Museum House Admission Ticket

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Description

Because the evoked power that the objects contained and because its surroundings dominated by the presence of the sea, the house of Isla Negra is a kind of visual and material compendium of the imaginary poetic of Neruda.The place was originally called Las Gaviotas (Sea gulls). The poet renamed it: “negra” for the colour of the rocks, and “isla”, perhaps because over there he could isolate himself to write. On his return to Chile from Europe, in 1937, he was looking for a place to dedicate himself to his Canto general, a great book about American history and nature. “The wild coast of Isla Negra, with the tumultuous oceanic movement, allowed me to surrender with passion to the venture of my new song” – he annotated in his memories.

The house of Isla Negra is inserted in a coastal landscape. Over there the sea with its waves, breakers, beach and rocks, updated the enormous impression the poet had when, being a child, confronted the ocean for the first time, in Puerto Saavedra. Later the sea was converted in one of the mythical scenaries of his poetry.The most important collections kept in this house, are related to the sea: figure heads, retort of sails, ships inside bottles, seashells, cachalote´s teeth. There are also spaces that commemorate his friendship with some death poets, whose names he made engrave in the beams of the bar. Other collections shown to the visitors, such as bottles of strange shapes, masks, antique shoes and smoking pipes.Sergio Soza, architect and friend of Neruda, projected the new additions to start on 1965: the arcs that joint the bodies of the house, and the enclosure that lodge the room of the horse and the Covacha. This was a space where the poet recluded himself to write. He put on it a zinc roof, to hear the song of the rain and evoke, again, the feelings of the house he habited in his childhood, in the rainy south of Chile.In the house of Isla Negra, Neruda wrote an important part of his literary work, gathered in there the majority of his books and also exercised the hospitality, other of the legacies of his southern childhood.The poet always celebrated the Fiestas Patrias. Even though the situation the country was living, after the military coup, on the 18th of September of 1973 some friends came to Isla Negra. But they only brought alarming news.The next day, Neruda severely sick, was taken in ambulance to the capital, from where he only would return to Isla Negra in December of 1992, when his remains were transferred there, beside to the remains of his wife, Matilde Urrutia. This funeral was realized with all the honours that the poet deserved, and with the assistance of the highest authorities of the nation. In this way was fulfilled the request Neruda had expressed about fifty years before in his poem “Disposiciones” of Canto general:“Companions, bury me in Isla Negra, / in front of the sea I know, to each wrinkled area of stones/ and to the waves that my lost eyes/ won’t go back to see…”

Because the evoked power that the objects contained and because its surroundings dominated by the presence of the sea, the house of Isla Negra is a kind of visual and material compendium of the imaginary poetic of Neruda.The place was originally called Las Gaviotas (Sea gulls). The poet renamed it: “negra” for the colour of the rocks, and “isla”, perhaps because over there he could isolate himself to write. On his return to Chile from Europe, in 1937, he was looking for a place to dedicate himself to his Canto general, a great book about American history and nature. “The wild coast of Isla Negra, with the tumultuous oceanic movement, allowed me to surrender with passion to the venture of my new song” – he annotated in his memories.